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ILLINOIS

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

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2015WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT?

TUTl

THE LIBRARY
OF THE -

pi"rn<1TY OF !UI!«MS

A BACCALAUREATE ADDRESS

DELIVERED AT THE COMMENCEMENT OF CORNELL
UNIVERSITY, JUNE 12, 1881.

TUTTLE

EDWARD E. HALE.

PRINTED BY REQUEST.

BOSTON :

A. WILLIAMS & CO., WASHINGTON STREET.
1881.

LLWHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT?

A BACCALAUREATE ADDRESS

DELIVERED AT THE COMMENCEMENT OF CORNELL
UNIVERSITY, JUNE 12, 1881.

BY

EDWARD E. HALE.

PRINTED BY REQUEST.

BOSTON: ; t
A. WILLIAMS & CO., WASHINGTON^TREET.
1881. />37**73
HlZttr

WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT?*

Two dr three hundred colleges of America send forth
their graduates upon the country this summer. The
largest will give degrees to two hundred or more, the
smallest to one or two. That would be a high estimate
which supposed that six thousand graduates were this
summer added to the little company of the liberally
educated men of the land. That little company starts
at tremendous odds, if we count them by numbers
only, in the effort for which all its members have
been educated, to maintain the Idea. It is enrolled to
maintain in the land the sense of Spirit, of Spiritual
Law and of the Eternal Realities ; in the face of smoke
and dust and the things that perish in the using; in
the face of those empirical observations which are called
Physical Laws ; in the face of man's wish to heap up
in bulk the visible materials for future greed, indolence,
and ease.

We shall be taught this summer by the more care-
less part of the public press that the supply thus
afforded of educated men is much greater than the
demand. A certain education is needed before a man
can write a paragraph for a newspaper, and the more
ignorant of the men who . have achieved that standard
are always for warning the rest of mankind that there
is no more room. But Mr. Webster's great word is
more true. " There is always room higher up," he
said. Fortunately for this country and for mankind,
the standard of Liberal Education is always rising. It
is for you, gentlemen and ladies, to see that it rises
higher than ever before; nor do you let your personal

* The address was repeated at the Commencement of Antioch College, June 22, 1881.4

eagerness and hope flag or faint, as the great army
presses up and on.

Far from believing that America has, or can have,
any too many men or women of the very highest ancf
most broad and careful education, we shall have reason
to see that she has quite too few. Our chief danger,
indeed, is that our men of education are detailed to too
many duties by the ignorance or incompetence of their
subordinates. It is said of General Grant, when he was
approaching Vicksburg, that his officers, brave enough
and willing enough, had so little military experience
that his orders to them were not mere directions as to
what they should do, but instruction in detail as to the
manner in which it should be done. It is said that a
collection of those orders would form a compendium or
hand-book of the Military Art. The man of liberal
training with us has always much of that experience.
The sculptor in America can confide nothing to his
workman. The editor often needs to know how to set
type. Many a time will you have to instruct your
bookbinder. Woe to you if you expect to hire a com-
petent translator! The educated man in America is
only a helpless Dominie Sampson, if he cannot harness
his own horse, and on occasion shoe him. He must in '
a thousand exigencies paddle his own canoe. And
the first danger which comes to him is that in all these
side duties he will forget the great central object to
which his life is consecrated. He may forget that
the first object is to take Vicksburg. Because he has
become interested in some town history or some bit
of family genealogy, he may waste his life on what
should have been the amusement of only one bivouac
on the way.

Clearly, it is my business to-day to present as well
as I can the moral side of the great office for which
this State and your country have trained you.

I. Do not forget that there is an obligation on your
part toward the country and the State. Every Ameri-
can should be proud of the efforts, more than princely,5

which this country has made for the highest and broad-
est liberal education. More than princely, I say, for
as yet no princes have done such things. The nation
gave to the new States every thirty-second part of its
domain for public education, and of this devoted one-
sixteenth part to the foundation of colleges. Then, by
the special act to which Cornell University owes its
existence, the nation gave i.t that immense endowment
of Western lands, which makes so large a part of the
fund in the hands of its Trustees. No prince ever
gave, few princes could give, such gifts to a Univer-
sity. When you hear it said that the American people
loves the dollar and is not faithful to the Idea; ask in
reply what prince or people but the American people
ever gave up so large a part of its appanage for the
education of its people.

In mere gratitude to such a nation and such a State,
you owe, your lives long, something to their service, in
dragging fheir people from the Serbonian bog, and in
lifting them to the noblest and highest life.

II. For this purpose, however, as I have intimated, if
we were to be satisfied by any count of numbers, we are
quite too few. We should be lost in the host, as the
handful of Richard's horsemen in the crusades were
once and again lost in the hordes of Saracens around
them. To recur to this year's statistics. At the out-
side, six or seven thousand educated Americans are
added this summer to this little army of Red-cross
Knights ; and, in the same year, five hundred thousand
men, women, and children will be poured in on this land
from Europe, unable, perhaps, to speak the language of
the land, careless of its traditions, ignorant of its laws
and customs,— pushed by the bayonet or beckoned by
distant love to emigrate they know not whither,—
and landing all unorganized upon a strange shore.
Just to imagine the proportions of the forces, let me
suppose that these men were divided into colonies of
eight hundred each ; and one young graduate of this
year from an American college sent with them, to
instruct them in our laws, to show them how to meet6

our climate, to teach them our history, nay, our lan-
guage. That alone would use all this year's gradu-
ates. One would say that here only was work enough
of the very highest range for the graduates of this
year. But one sees at once that, in that subdivision
of our force, nobody would be left from our newly com-
missioned officers to care for the needs, the highest
needs, of the fifty million people who are already here
upon the ground. Yet you must take the places of us
old men who are passing off the stage; and, as I am
now to try to show, there are duties pressing upon you
which we never knew in our time.

The 'leaven of the Highest Education must leaven
the whole lump of American life.

III. One is fairly tempted to wish that some Lethe
might sink the remembrance of our old discussions and
partisanships for a few months, that we might all con-
sider, as it deserves, the great subject of our duty to
the next half-century, and who shall say how much
longer? What shall this people do with its enormous
wealth ? The old struggle, when starving colonists
gnawed so close the bone, is over. The wealth of the
country is increasing with such strides that no statistics
announce it. As we never know the rapid drift of the
raft or ice-floe on which we go and come, we are not our-
selves aware, at the moment, .of our gains; and we do
not carefully enough study the duties which belong to
them. Everybody is richer in the real elements of
wealth. Now comes the question which Bulwer puts
into the title of one of his best novels, What will he
do with it ? What will this prodigal, folded in his
Father's arms, and sharing the infinite bounties of infi-
nite love, do with the lavish gifts which from that
Father he receives?

It is said truly that a single living man, Corliss of
Providence, by a single invention of one generation has
added one-third to the physical working power of the
world. Such is the magic of our day. Scott sang of
Roderic that

" One blast upon his bugle horn
Was worth a thousand men,"7

and that figure is taken from the old legend in the
romance of Roncesvalles. But what legend or magic
tells you of such a bugle horn as starts into existence,
I do not say the men, but the giants, whose noise-
less toil mines, weaves, spins, pumps, forges, stamps,
pushes, and pulls for you, so that you may go home the
earlier from your workshop, or fare more bountifully,
or sleep the longer? No statistics can announce the
worth of that one miracle. But this is sure, that Cad-
mus might sow his dragon's teeth again, and call into
being a hundred million armed men.

" Now nodding plumes appear, and shining crests ;

Now the broad shoulders and the rising breasts ;

Now all the field the breathing harvest swarms,

A growing host, a crop <?f men and arms : "

and, it they were put, on any possible arena, in competi-
tion with the petty addition made by this one invention
of Corliss to our modern forces since most of us were
born, they would wilt like summer weeds in the rivalry
before such antagonism. Now, here is the result of
only one of the physical improvements of our time,
made by one man. Remember the crowd of similar im-
provements. Remember, for instance, Ezra Cornell, to
be ranked among the first of the men to whom we are
so indebted. Remember the Stephensons, the electri-
cians, Brunei, Ericsson, and the steamboat men; count
in Edison, Brush, Siemens, and that set; look at the
reapers, mowers, and planters ; think of ship-building,
canal-building, the opening of rivers, and the extension
of roads; and then go out and look over the land, see
men harvesting, by irrigation, fifty bushels of wheat to
an acre on the Great American Desert of the geogra-
phies of twenty years ago ; see ingots of silver lying on
the platforms of railroad stations, safe from robbery
because they are too heavy for men to "lift" without
observation : devote yourself a few hours to such exam^
ination, and you will have some faint idea of what is
meant by the enlargement in wealth of this end of the
nineteenth century.8

Perhaps you will then devote yourselves with some
seriousness to the question which, as I hold, is the real
question of our time, " What will they do with it ?"

Why, to take one little instance, I have heard old
men say that the mere easy use of friction matches
saves every day for each active man and woman ten
minutes of life. I think that is true. You are not old
enough to remember the adventures of the boy called
out of his bed in the morning to go and fetch a pan of
coals from the next neighbors. The lad tumbles into
his clothes, ploughs through the snow, finds that Mrs.
Smith's luck has been better than his mother's, and
the careful ashes of her hearth have preserved the
vestal fire. A glowing brand is given him in his
warming-pan, and he returns in triumph home. The
alternative would have been to strike flint against
steel, not to say against knuckles, till a reluctant spark
fell on tinder equally reluctant, till this was fanned
by careful breath till it would light a match which
would light a candle. The journey to Mrs. Smith's was,
on the whole, light in comparison. Does one trivial
invention save twenty minutes a day in each house-
hold, ten minutes to the man, ten minutes to the
woman ? That is a saving for this nation of more
than twice the amount of work which Cheops put upon
his pyramid, and so much addition to the real resource
of the world is made by that one invention.

What will the world do with it ? What will the na-
tion do ?

Will she build pyramids like Cheops ?

Will she waste it in wars like Napoleon ?

Will she pile it up in new St. Peters like Leo ?

Will she spend it in fashion of dress, in purple and
crimson and gold lace and embroidery ?

Here is her treasure. What will she do with it ?

That question is the question of to-day. It is the
question for every graduating class of this year. Here
is the Cadmus, who sees the host of millions of these
giants, ready to work for him, rising every hour from
the seed which the fathers have been sowing. They9

will turn against each other as they did in the old fable,
if you gentlemen and ladies, and others like you, do not
lead them, as in the fable Cadmus led them. Where
will you lead ? How will you lead ? Simply and se-
riously, what are you for ?

IV. Clearly enough, your service is not so much
needed in the creation of more wealth, of more resource,
but in the direction of what we have for the noblest
and the best. If your education here has been what I
believe it has been, this is what it has been for. That
is, it has been a liberal education rather than what the
Germans call a bread-and-butter education. So much
the better for you and for the country. JDo not fear
but the giants will follow your lead, if you are willing
to show them the way. If, as Cadmus did, you choose
to build cities, do not fear but the new resources of the
land will be drawing your water, hewing your timber,
mixing your cement, and piling your stones. The
huijnane arts, or the liberal arts, are from their very
nature the contriving and directing arts. The men
who are trained in them, from the nature of things, lead
all other men. You are to accept the position of .lead-
ers. Modestly, but certainly, because the substance
is more than the show, because the idea controls the
form, because mind rules matter, b'ecause spirit rules
all, you are to take the position of spiritual leaders of
the land. Why, it was long since observed that, even
in superficial fashions, all men follow the lead of
the liberal professions. As they spell, all men try to
spell. As they write, all men try to write. As they
live, all men try to live. Even as they dress, all men
try to dress. The black coat of the clerk becomes the
dress-suit of the gentleman. Gold lace falls off, the
sword-knot is forgotten, the sword disappears, and the
great army of men affect, in their outward costume, on
all days of ceremony, to belong to the company of men
of liberal training. So the millionnaire of yesterday
builds a palace to-day, and his architect arranges a
library as certainly as he arranges a kitchen. Then
he comes to you, gentlemen, to say that he has fiveIO

thousand square feet of book-room, and that he will
thank you to select the books for them. And, as his
son grows up, he will send him to Cornell, and as his
daughter grows up, he will send her to Sage College.
He is determined that the future shall have what he
did not have. He comes to you for the direction of
these useless millions, which he has created from the
winds and the waves and the dead soil.

These are the most trivial and superficial illustra-
tions, mere straws which show the current.. They are
all the better for my purpose. No fear but you can
lead the land, if you want to lead it and wish to lead it.
Your only questions are where, when, and how.

A thousand voices this week will tell you that the
first duty of the well-trained scholar is to go into the
caucus, and control the partisan arrangements of the
country. Some of these voices will probably address
us here. You will be told how William Pitt, the
younger, was Prime Minister of England when he was
twenty-three, and you will be urged to go and do like-
wise. Such is doubtless one duty of the American
scholar; but I do not believe that it is his first duty.
Fortunately for us, every fundamental principle in our
political order has been settled, and rightly settled in
most instances, a century ago. With us, fortunately,
all the drift and weight of conservatism are on the side
of institutions founded in the most radical democracy.
For this reason is it that our partisan questions, com-
pared with those of other lands, are mere ripples on the
surface of a summer sea. Our real interests are in the
better and nobler training of our people, in the making
men more manly, woman more womanly, and the land
more godly. It may be that these interests shall call
one in fifty of you into Administration. But, with us,
Administration is not Government. With us, the peo-
ple govern. In their homes, they govern, and not by
any proxy. Presidents, governors, secretaries, and sen-
ators are their clerks and messengers ; do well, indeed,
when they are obsequious and obedient clerks and
messengers. What the scholar of America is to doII

is to elevate the people, to enlighten the people, and
give to it new life.

V. Observe again that, wherever the people are, the
scholar must be there also, if he is to carry on this
work. D'Artagnan and Aramis and Quentin Dur-
ward had to go to Paris, to the capital, to seek their
sovereigns, if they would serve the State. But, with us,
the sovereign is working in the mines of Lake Supe-
rior. The sovereign is herding cattle in Colorado, he
is feeding the world from the wheat plains of Dakota.
The empire of this country is not in the hands of the
large cities, though the writers in the large cities try to
make you think so. It is in the hands of those large
country towns, where the best men lead the town and
direct its education, its local government, and give tone
and courage to its people, towns without' rings, towns
not governed by bar-rooms. It is the men from these
towns who are pushed forward into important public
life, and loyally sustained by the American people.
Emigrants from Europe, still blinded by European
prejudices, settle in clans in large cities, and are led
blindly by other men. But the American people is
still true to that enthusiasm for local government which
so surprised De Tocqueville, and which, to this hour,
not one foreign writer in ten understands. Find for
me the States or parts of States which, on the whole,
direct the American policy in her public affairs, and
you find States or parts of States which are under the
empire, not of the few large cities of America, but of
her numerous smaller cities or larger towns. Literally,
gentlemen, it does not matter, for the sway that you
are to have over the next half-century, whether you go
to the wilderness of Lake Superior or the most crowded
ward in New York. A man's a man. A leader is a
leader. If you have in you the stuff of which leaders
are made, you will lead. That is, if you rely on the
Idea, if you make yourself an ally of the Almighty,
speak his word and do his deed, you will, of course,
take place and authority among men.

So much for the question, Where ?12

As to the question, When you shall take this direc-
tion, there is never but one answer,— Now. To-day.
Now is the accepted time. I trust that your four years
at college are not to be flung away like an old garment.
I think you have just whetted your appetite in litera-
ture, in art, in science, in philosophy. As Paul Jones
said, You are just ready to begin. You are not to
stay here longer. No. But you are to go on in just
those studies which please you most, with the freedom
of manhood joined to the training of youth, and to carry
them on, in one direction or another, till you die. You
are, I trust, enthusiastic about Alma Mater. I hope
you are always going to say that Cornell is the best col-
lege in the world. Do not be satisfied with saying so.
Show it, wherever you go. Show what a man of liberal
education is, by the eagerness with which you pursue
that education. No one need shrink, because he is go-
ing into what is called business. Any man and woman
of you can secure, and ought, two hours a day for gen-
erous reading or study. No man or woman needs
more to keep up bravely and well the line of education
which he has selected for his own. Make it your duty
then to carry, wherever you go, be it to the ranch, be it
to the mine, be it to the cotton plantation, the spirit,
the thoroughness, even the elegancies of this University.
Why, Bernard civilized Western Europe by sending out
from Clairvaux two hundred and fifty swarms of edu-
cated men, who made two hundred and fifty other
centres of faith and of knowledge in countries then bar-
barous. More than this is in the power, nay, more
than this be the future, of Cornell University in the
next thirty years.

Thus, it is the duty of every man and woman of you
to level up from the first moment the public education
of the place where you shall live. The village school,
the high school, the county academy or college, the
public library, these live and grow, or starve and die,
according as you determine, you and those others who
have received what you have received from the lavish
love of the State and of the nation. We have all seen;3

what we call Ideal Communities, where effort in this
line has been crowned. One comes to a village of
Friends, sometimes, of the people called Quakers, where
there was never a pauper, where every child receives
what we call a high school education, where to each
family the public library supplies the last and best in
literature. And this is possible everywhere. A man
need not be on the board of school supervisors to do it.
I met, the other day, a learned judge who told me that
for more than twenty years he had met every winter,
in his own library, once a week, a club of his neighbors,
men and women, who came, and came gladly, that he
might guide them in the study of history. " And all
those people," said he, laughing, there are three or
four hundred of them now, scattered over the world,
" they all know what to read, and how to read it." You
see that village is another place because that one man
lived there. Yet there is only one man who chose to
make himself so far an apostle to carry forward the
light which his Alma Mater had kindled.

Or consider for a moment how the great national
pulpit might, be improved, "that pulpit to which ten
men listen for one who sits in church or chapel on
Sunday," I mean the daily and weekly press of the
land, if every man of liberal culture, in any humblest
village of the land, saw it was his part and privilege to
hold up the hands of the spirited printer, who has car-
ried into the wilderness a few pounds of type, who
prints the legal notices and the advertisements of the
country stores. What folly to hold back from him and
ridicule him ! What a chance, if you will only make
friends with him and help him ! He does not want to
make a bad newspaper. He wants it to be as good as
the London Spectator. What graduate does not want
it the same thing! What might not the local press of
this country be, if the educated men of this country
came loyally and regularly to the duty and privilege,
I do not say of making it the mouth-piece of their con-
venience, but the educator and enlivener of the com-
munity in which they live ! Do not let such a prophet
' be undeserving of honor in his own home.14

And I might say the same thing of the beauty of
the town you live in. You are to carry to it the tradi-
tions of College Hill. I say the same of its health.
You carry to it what you have been learning of hy-
giene and of engineering. I say the same of its social
order. The possible social order of an American vil-
lage is as far beyond anything revealed to us in an
English or French novel of social order in England or
France as the Constitution is beyond the clumsy
makeshifts of the feudal schemes. I say the same of
the hospitality of this imagined village where you
are to plant a nursery of your Cornell seedlings, the
hospitality in which it shall welcome strangers. The
Norwegian boy, the Irish girl, as- they grow to man-
hood and to womanhood in that community, shall
always bless God for two critical days, if they know
for what they should be grateful. One is the day
when the Old World faded blue out of the horizon in
the distance, the other the day when a son or daugh-
ter of Cornell or Sage College accepted the charge,
God imposed, of making that community to be the
very City of God and the gate of Heaven.

VI. Such victories are possible to .him or her who
accepts the great alliance, who in the phrase of Paul,
the omnipotent sage, is willing to be a fellow-workman
together with God. That man, that woman, in accept-
ing the Universe,, takes Infinite Power as an ally. For
this, this apostle of the highest manhood and wom-
anhood keeps himself pure. The wisdom that is from
above is first pure. And it is the pure in heart who
see God, and they only. Character is the foundation
stone on which this City of God is to be built; and
you, gentlemen and ladies, build as of straw and stub-
ble, if that foundation is not first laid!

You spring from men whose hearts and lives were pure,

Their eye was single, and their walk was sure.

See that their children's children in their day
May bless such fathers' fathers when they pray.

As you work on the home intrusted to you to make
its future better than its present, to make it true to thei5

idea which the ancients called the City of God, see
that in your own examples, every little plan for social
life, every scrap of copy which you write for the village
newspaper, every word you speak in the daily exchange
at the post-office, every hint you drop in the joke of
a charade at an evening party, every plan you form for
more spirited social order, are all aimed and shot home
for the purity of the moral atmosphere of the town.
It is all that boys and men, girls and women, may be
more manly and more womanly. This is what the land
requires and what the future requires. I might say
that it is all they require. For, to him who seeks this
first, all else is added.

The land cares for a better Testament or a better
Bible; it cares for better constitutions or laws; it cares
for a simpler and more pure Civil Service, only as these
things, for things they are, give it purer and better
lives. By their fruits, all these things are to be tested;
and the fruits are pure and manly men, pure and
womanly women.

Yes, and the reason why you see the men in my call-
ing as cheerful and hopeful as we are, why we love our
work and want to enlist others in it, is that this is our
single aim, and there is no danger that any other call-
ing shall divert us from an enterprise so grand. To
build up the City of God, though we only carry a hod
of mortar, is our only affair. To help his kingdom for-
ward is our only business. We do not know half the
temptations which come to men absorbed in other
cares, because with us our daily duty is all in the
infinite work; and, though one were in the commonest
humdrum of daily ministry, he sees how he is uniting
with God and building up his kingdom.

That you may help the land to such fruits as pure
and manly men, pure and womanly women* whatever
your vocation, you go forth, as I said, the loyal knights-
errant of the Idea. You stand for the Truth before
this land. Every man who is working for it looks
for your alliance as you draw near. The question
is in the comparison little what particular callingi6

shall be yours. You are men and women liberally-
trained, and because of that every man's eye shall be
on you. This poor doctor, waiting to improve drainage,
relies on you the moment he hears you have made your
home there. This poor lawyer, struggling for the
rights of a handful of Indians, looks at once to you.
The preacher, frowning on profanity, striving to stamp
out intemperance, looks for aid to you as soon as you
come near. Why ? but because the degree we give you
here means that you have been trained to be prophets
to the Idea, to build on the eternal foundations for the
infinite future. Does any man say that this is tran-
scendental or mystical ? Let it be so. The highest
transcendentalism, the noblest mysticism, is this lofty
idealism, which is satisfied with nothing less than the
perfect world. It is not satisfied with that which has
been attained, but reaches forward to something better
and more. It is because you are Hothing less than
children of the Almighty God, who can share his pur-
pose, conceive of his purpose, and enter into his ser-
vice, that it has been worth while to train you here,
and give you the best armor for conflict, the best" arms
for victory. It is as you shall accept the situation, and
enter into life as his children, that you shall be able to
succeed in the enterprise of leaders. Are there ten
such men and women ? They could save even Sodom
and Gomorrah. Who goes forward in that faith, why,
she silences lions as Una in her purity, he treads upon
scorpions as Michael on the archangej. He who
knows God and sees him, as the pure in heart see
him, he who talks with him by day and sleeps in his
arms by night, he has entered into his house and found
himself at home there. To him is given the glory of
seeing the fruits of his training here. He goes hence,
not in vain, to build the City of God for the home of
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